To celebrate National Short Story Week, starting on Monday, Spoken Ink, which specialises in short-story downloads, is offering listeners a free story every day, kicking off with Conan Doyle and ending with Lionel Shriver. Devotees of the genre will already be familiar with the MR James spinechiller and Saki's "Sredni Vashtar", which adds a new dimension to nasty things in woodsheds. Roald Dahl's "The Hitchhiker" was new to me, as was "The Pierce Sisters" by Mick Jackson, the quirkiest, cleverest and most atmospheric piece I've read in years. Lol and Edna live in a remote, ramshackle seaside shack and survive by taking their boat out six days a week, lowering their nets and consigning everything they don't immediately eat to their smokehouse. Once a fortnight they wrap the kippered results in newspaper and exchange them for bread, tea and salt in the town nine miles away. One day they rescue a shipwrecked man and bring him home. Here's what happens when he recovers and regards his saviours for the first time. "Now there was no denying that Lol and Edna Pierce had passed their prime a few years earlier. The sisters had led long and arduous lives. Their cheeks were blustered by the sea and wind, their hands were rough, their hair was matted. Their clothes were creased and greased from all the fish they'd rubbed up against. So when the half-drowned man opened his eyes it must have come as quite a shock to have both Pierces peering at him when, to be fair, either one would have been more than enough." It's a surreal story; I won't spoil it except to say that Suzanne Andrade's exquisitely modulated delivery and incongruous cut-glass accents (you can almost hear her recoiling from the smell of fish) made me laugh out loud. The stories range from 13 to 38 minutes apiece. Special offers aside, Spoken Ink downloads cost between 99p and £6.60 depending on length.

"Unless one is wealthy there is no use in being a charming fellow. Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic. It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. These are the great truths of modern life . . ." No, it's not Lady Bracknell, it's the beginning of "The Model Millionaire", one of the sillier but still charming stories in this collection, first published in 1887, eight years before The Importance of Being Earnest made Wilde the darling of the West End stage. Aside from The Picture of Dorian Gray, he is remembered more as a writer of plays than of fiction. Pity. In prose he can, with a few well-chosen words, set a scene as graphically as a stage crowded with OTT characters. I feel vaguely guilty reading Wilde in these straitened economic times – he's so obsessed with impossibly handsome young men, wealth and privilege, but I don't apologise. He makes me laugh.

Technically these aren't short stories – they're the first instalment of Bennett's brilliant four-volume memoir. But because they're not chronological you can dip in and out at random. How the family copes with Mam's Alzheimer's doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs but, in between the truly dreadful visits to the mental asylum, he remembers happier times – Aunty Myra, for instance, coming home from India and presenting the Bennetts with a Buddha. "'I don't care if it is a God,'" says Mam when we get home. 'I'm not having it on the sideboard with a bellybutton that size.'"